datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
WikiData is a database-oriented version of Wikipedia intended for categorising relations between concepts.
For example, Google (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q95) is "owned by" XXVI Holdings (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q100292691) since 2017.
XXVI Holdings similarly shows that it is owned by Alphabet Inc (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q20800404), which is owned by a list of people and entities with various different voting rights.
There is also the "Parent Organisation" relation (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P749) which links Google to Alphabet directly.
These should all be computer-readable.
Thanks, this is a great idea! With a quick look, this seems possible for big enough organizations, but might be spotty for others. I’ll take a closer look. Would be nice if there’s linkage to other database, such as the other commenter’s suggestion of littlesis.
I would also be really interested in a dataset like this. Institutional investors for public companies are sometimes listed in the SEC 10k form, but I have yet to fully learn the structure of these documents. Someone intelligent could probably make a web crawler to scrape institutional and single person ownership of companies from SEC filings. Ideally with a proper dataset like this you could map out who owns each company, and who owns each of the owning companies etc. which would be really interesting information.
I don’t currently have adequate understanding of different SEC FORMS, and although I can use python I have no experience writing web crawlers at the moment.
I dont have any experience with understanding SEC forms either. Is there a repository for SEC forms? Or do you imagine looking at all companies website to mine for those forms?
SEC has the Edgar database where you can lookup any company and access there different SEC forms, but you still need to know which forms to look for the information in. For example, the 10k of one company had the ownership informing of top shareholders, but I wasn’t able to find that info in the 10k of another company (possibly because I didn’t know where to look). I know you can use EDGAR database to at least lookup these forms, but I do not know the full capabilities of the database (such as if you can query for ownership directly) because I just discovered it the other day.
It looks like EDGAR has a rest API and a full text search as well
I would think this would be a kind of question for an OSINT community. It would be worth reposting the question there.
thanks for the suggestion! ~~Which osint community should I post to? Is it the lemmy world one?~~ done